Bruce Walsh was 11, walking home from school in Bridgewater, N.S., thinking about how he was going to kill himself.

He knew where dad Jack kept his guns — too messy. He knew the medicine cabinet was a general source of possibility, but didn’t know which drugs would be effective.

His train of thought was interrupted when he entered his house to the smell of the fireplace and the sound of his mother, Evelyn, crying.

Her tears were for the book she was reading, Leon Uris’s Mila 18, a novel about the Jewish resistance of the Nazis in Second World War Warsaw.

What ensued was a turning point in Walsh’s life, and the reason he says the Holocaust saved his life.

He had come to believe that he was an abomination, after reading a 1950s-era Encyclopedia Brittanica article on homosexuality.

“It told me essentially that homosexuals kill themselves; this is the right thing to do,” said Walsh.

But his mother’s explanation of the Holocaust led to an epiphany: “If the Germans were that wrong about Jews, then maybe society was that wrong about me as an 11-year-old homosexual.

“I realized at that point there was so much more I needed to learn,” said Walsh. “So as opposed to killing myself, I started to read and trying to figure out the world and my place in it, and justice and power and all of these sorts of things.”

He became a voracious reader. His reverence of books and knowledge are the root of his career today. But at the root of his success is his ability to recognize and sell a good story.

Walsh’s marketing expertise has helped transform the University of Regina’s publishing arm since he took over as its director four years ago.

He was hired for the university administration’s last-ditch experiment to make the Canadian Plains Research Centre profitable.

Four months into his employ, on June 1, 2013, the rebranded U of R Press launched. Its first book was James Daschuk’s Clearing the Plains, the first of six national bestsellers.

The press’s motto, “a voice for many peoples,” is not just lip service.

The Indigenous stories it has published, from the bestselling Education of Augie Merasty to the most recent Claiming Anishnaabe, are all about “making that history that was either not written, or long forgotten, available to the Canadian and international public,” said Dave Malloy, U of R vice-president research.

“We’re changing the narrative,” said Walsh. “I believe in what we’re doing. I believe in books as a way of making the world a better place.”

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The U of R Press has published six national bestsellers so far.Michael Bell /
Regina Leader-Post

Walsh has had at least three life-changing moments in his 57 years on Earth. The first was as a child, when he realized he knew how to read.

“My head exploded,” said Walsh. “I was four or five and I was like (gasp!), ‘This is really big.’”

His second mind-blowing moment came with the aforementioned Holocaust lesson and the revelation that an encyclopedia could be wrong.

The third was when he was a Dalhousie University student working in a Halifax restaurant, as someone mentioned to him a publishing course in Toronto.

“That was it.”

He moved to Toronto and enrolled in a two-year program at Centennial College — of which he completed one semester before running out of money.

To start him on his path, though, he’d learned nearly every function of a publishing house — international standard book numbers (ISBNs), copy editing, production — except how to sell.

“The sales rep, they said, was the person who made more money than everybody else, and they got a car and expense account, and they usually were the people who went on to become the publisher,” Walsh recalled.

“I said, ‘Oh, well when do we learn about the sales rep?’ and they said, ‘Oh, we don’t teach you about the sales rep.’ And I thought, ‘Well geez, that’s actually what I want to do.’”

He learned to sell from working at a bookstore, Book City, and serving in a restaurant, Le Bistro Café. The latter job taught him organization, efficiency, teamwork and a thick skin.

His marketing experience, though, originated with his volunteer work in Toronto as an anti-censorship advocate.

He learned about the legal system, fundraising, publicity and media relations as a member of CensorStop, also known as the Canadian Committee Against Customs Censorship.

When friend and group leader Jeff Moore fell ill, Walsh took charge of the group, which was protesting the federal government’s seizure of books destined for Glad Day Bookshop, a queer bookstore in Toronto.

“This was the height of the AIDS epidemic. (Customs) started censoring all of the safe sex information at the back of gay porn magazines, all references to anal sex were censored, and I was burying my friends,” said Walsh. “It was a murderous censorship policy.”

Walsh’s passion was so strong that he quit his first publishing job in June 1992 in protest.

His employer, Oxford University Press, had refused to bring in Richard D. Mohr’s book Gay Ideas.

“They were afraid of Canada Customs censorship,” said Walsh, lest backing the book embarrass the company.

He remembers his reaction: “You’re going to drop scholarship because you think it might be embarrassing?”

His frustration here hearkens back to the Holocaust, too: “The first thing Hitler went after were books.”

Walsh’s ideal of free expression continues today. In fact, he says, it’s the basis for the entire U of R Press program.

“We have a book series on the human body called The Exquisite Corpse, and it’s starting with those areas that make us most uncomfortable,” said Walsh. Last year’s history of the anus, Jonathan Allan’s Reading From Behind, was one.

“We’ve just started Canada’s first black studies list. We publish old people.

“The books we do on Indigenous histories, that is censored history. All of the books we do on Indigenous languages, those are censored languages.”

That’s why the press’s first book appealed to him so much.

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James Daschuk’s book Clearing the Plains was the first book published by U of R Press.BRYAN SCHLOSSER /
Regina Leader-Post

When Walsh came in to direct what was formerly the Canadian Plains Research Centre, he says there were few manuscripts to choose from.

With CPRC’s uncertain future, authors had been advised to take their work elsewhere.

The CPRC was established in 1973. Its annual catalogue was small, eight to 10 publications a year.

“It was a good press, but it wasn’t financially viable,” said Malloy. “It was producing a good product and good scholarly work, but the sales were such that we essentially deemed that it was appropriate to close it down, to be frank.”

But, before doing so, “We thought, ‘OK, let’s give this one more chance before giving up the ghost.’”

“I knew how much potential the press had, and that it would require someone with a lot of courage and skill and someone who could think outside the box,” said Anne Pennylegion, a former CPRC employee and current program co-ordinator for the Saskatchewan Library Association.

“My mind immediately went to Bruce.”

He had taken McGill-Queens University Press, “a nice academic press,” and “put them on the map with his marketing skills,” said Pennylegion.

She alerted Walsh to the job posting and encouraged him to apply.

“To be honest, 10 minutes into a conversation with Bruce and I think everybody in the committee was looking at each other wondering, who is this guy?” said Malloy.

“Bruce’s personality and his energy and his knowledge, his connections in the publishing business in Canada, are really second to none.”

When Walsh arrived as the new director, he noticed a manuscript called Patterns of Disease, Policies of Starvation. It was published with the less bulky title of Clearing the Plains.

“I think this is the most important work of Canadian history I’ve ever read in my life,” he recalled. “I’m a student of Canadian history and I don’t know any of this stuff, and if I don’t know it, I bet you most people don’t know it, and we need to know it.”

“It wouldn’t have seen the light of day if it wasn’t for Bruce Walsh finding it in the shelves and reading it and realizing what a tremendous contribution this book would be to Canadian history,” said Malloy.

“I believe it’s the bestselling academic history book in the 21st century; it’s already sold 25,000 copies, which is really remarkable for an academic text. You know, this isn’t Stephen King horror stories; this is history.”

Those sales weren’t a fluke.

“We gave everything we got and we spent a fortune marketing it,” said Walsh — that fortune being $20,000. “Publishing is a gamble. It paid off.”

“We know having an excellent product is the first step,” said Duncan Campbell, the press’s art director since 2009.

“Getting it out in the world is the second step, and it doesn’t just happen by accident. There’s none of this, ‘You build it, then they will come.’ It just doesn’t happen, because the market is so saturated with so much media now.”

In Walsh’s estimation, there’s another hurdle in getting attention in the industry.

“Within academic publishing, the dirty little secret is that nobody reads the books in house,” said Walsh.

“The humanities and social sciences are withering within the academy and I think academic publishing is part of the problem. We are the marketing arm of the academy. And if we’re not reading the books and we don’t know what we have, and I think a book that I can sell 25,000 of and somebody’s happy to sell 300 to 500 copies, (that’s) not doing the job.”

He has heard from other publishers, “Oh Bruce, scholars can’t write.” Walsh knows at least some of them can.

U of R Press started with 10 books a year. Now it produces 20. The goal is 30, which will require more space and a bigger team.

Financial viability is no longer an issue, says Malloy. Sales have increased 53 per cent in the last year.

Currently subsidized by the U of R, the Canada Book Fund, Canada Council for the Arts and Creative Saskatchewan, Malloy says the press is well on its way to being self-sustaining.

Catching the eye of national and international media — including CBC’s The Current, the Globe and Mail, the New York Times and The Guardian — and selling its books to international publishers, the press’s success has been a shock to Malloy.

“I did not have this expectation whatsoever,” he said. “My fear was that Clearing the Plains was going to be kind of a one-hit wonder and … every month, Bruce is shocking me with not only the books that he’s publishing, but also the authors that he’s attracting.”

Though Walsh calls it a “little house on the prairies,” U of R Press is looking beyond its region and appealing internationally. A South Korean publisher recently bought rights to Paul Dhillon’s 2016 book, The Surprising Lives of Small-Town Doctors.

“I think the beauty of regional stories is they start in a region and they start local, but then we learn that local is local everywhere, right?” said Kieran Leblanc, executive director of the Book Publishers Association of Alberta, which hosted Walsh as a conference keynote speaker last month.

“I think they’re publishing important books on topics that need to be discussed and stories that need to be told, and I think that’s true of many publishers in Canada.”

One of Walsh’s filters for weeding out books is whether it would appeal to Graeme Gibson, husband of Walsh’s old boss at LongPen, Margaret Atwood.

“Publishing is all about publishing into the zeitgeist,” said Walsh.

“It’s all about having forethought, a sense of the big picture and why this book fits into the world,” he added.

In some cases, he has had to seek out the authors to tell those stories.

Like Kurdish journalist Ayub Nuri, whom he scooped from Bloomsbury: Being Kurdish In A Hostile World was published last month.

With the Iraqi Kurdistan election on Nov. 1, “We’re part of a big global story.”

Increasingly, manuscripts fall into his lap — as was the case with David Carpenter’s collaboration with Joseph Auguste Merasty.

When Walsh first met Carpenter, at a Talking Fresh conference at Luther College, the author mentioned a manuscript in his drawer.

When Walsh read it, he was struck: “‘Oh my God, this is like The Diary of Anne Frank. This is like our Holocaust literature. These people have been through a genocide and look at the cost.’”

Learning that memoirist Merasty was in his 80s and homeless in Prince Albert, the U of R Press team worked hard to fast-track the book’s publication in 10 months instead of two years.

The book about Merasty’s childhood in residential school was first published in 2015. Its new edition hit shelves on March 4, just five days after Merasty’s death.

The 87-year-old didn’t get to see the province rally around his story as the Saskatchewan Library Association’s inaugural pick for One Book One Province.

“That was really a very important book in terms of pulling the team together,” said Walsh. “Everybody kind of got that ‘we’re doing something really, really important here, and we have to honour our author.’”

“There was something about this book that was really personal for everybody,” Campbell agreed. “It was so poignant, and so timely and so important that we all sort of felt protective over it.”

The book is a bestseller that has sold more than 15,000 copies; it has inspired a virtual reality short film. U of R Press is in negotiations for a feature film deal, on which it will act as a producer.

The book is also being taught in some schools.

“My goal as a publisher is to publish books that will be read 100 years from now,” said Walsh. “That book has real possibility of happening, that Augie’s voice will be read by young people forever.”

“Bruce and the people he works with deserve an almighty pat on the back and more encouragement to keep going with what they’re doing,” said Pennylegion.

“I’m always scared Bruce is going to have a heart attack, because he just goes night and day, but it’s obviously been very good for them.”

“The thing about Bruce is that he dreams big,” added Campbell, “and he has standards and big expectations about us and is able to steer us in directions that we never thought we would go in before.”

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